KunstMusik #18 Biographies
KATIE BISHOP
(b. 1988) is queer. She is femme. She is divisive and opinionated. She spent her formative years in Portland, Oregon, and Northern Arizona. During her undergrad studies at Portland State University, she studied music composition, philosophy, and gender studies. For graduate work, she studied composition and theory at the Aaron Copland School of music at Queens College. Currently, she curates deliver us from donald, a protest show centering queer and underrepresented artists and performers both inside and outside of music with all proceeds being donated to social justice organisations in New York. Katie’s principal composition teachers include Brad Hansen, René Favand-See, Bryan Johanson, Bonnie Miksch, Bruce Saylor, and Jeff Nichols. She currently lives and creates art in Bedstuy, Brooklyn. Find her online at TheQueerComposer.com and on various social media platforms @femmekatie
ISIS BROWN
(aka oghost haze) is a Black genderqueer musical artist from Oakland, California. Isis is currently finishing a BA in American Studies with a Concentration in Race and Music at Barnard College in New York City. For Isis, music serves as a way of experiencing the self and the world as well as a way of sharing and connecting with others. As an artist and songwriter, much of their music-making centers on the exploration of identity and existence, creating and finding selves, worlds, and realities. Isis finds power and freedom in sound. Their music is both a response and reflection of a QTPOC struggle against and within dominant society. Isis also works with other musicians who find similar importance in collective creativity as a means of societal change. Isis hopes to continue using their craft to create safe spaces for Black and queer youth. Their music can be found on soundcloud @ oghosthaze or @stupitkidz and on instagram @dankdirtygoddexx.
VERED ENGELHARD
(Lima, 1993) is an interdisciplinary practitioner based in New York City. Their written work ranges across verse, translation, art criticism, and critical theory. They have been published in academic contexts such as the Columbia University Law Blog, art journals such as the Brooklyn Rail, as well as independent publications. Their art and performance work has been shown in multiple locations in New York, Lima, and Berlin. Their latest series ‘Guided Improvisations’ utilizes mixed media such as drawing, sculpture, and video to create immersive contexts as music compositions, which could be regarded as either ‘expanded scores’ or ‘immersive notation.’ They hold a Masters in Art History from Columbia University.
MUYASSAR KURDI
is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound, extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, photography, and film. She has toured extensively in the U.S. and throughout Europe, including the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and the UK in both England and Scotland. A versatile improviser, Muyassar has composed and performed music for voice, harmonium, piano, lyre, autoharp, and theremin in both solo and collaborative environments. She currently focuses her attention to interweaving homemade electronic instruments and sculpture into her vocal and dance performances, stirring a plethora of emotions from her audience members through vicious noise, ritualistic chants, and meditative movements. Kurdi studied voice and dance with legendary vocalist, dancer and recording artist Meredith Monk via The House Foundation, as well as learning the Japanese dance tradition of Butoh with Tadashi Endo, director of the Butoh Center MAMU. She also explored Butoh with Mexican master of the form Diego Piñon among others throughout Chicago, NYC, Berlin, and Vienna. She currently studies with Juilliard faculty member Janis Brenner, also a member of the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble.
MIYA MASAOKA
works at the intersections of sound, composition, improvisation, spatialized perception and social interaction. Her work encompasses notated compositions, instrument building, creating computing wear-ables and sonifying the behavior of plants, brain activity, and insect movement. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Park Avenue Armory, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and MoMA PS1 (2018). She was the keynote speaker at NIME 2016 in Brisbane, Australia, and a Fulbright Fellow to Japan in 2016, and has received the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Alpert Award. Masaoka has taught composition at New York University and in the Music/Sound program at Bard College since 2002, and is currently the director of the Sound Art MFA at Columbia University. In 2017, her installation "Vaginated Ears" was shown at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and in 2018 she will premiere a work for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
LIZ PHILLIPS
(B.A. Interdisciplinary Art, Bennington College, 1973) has been making interactive multi-media installations since 1969. She exhibits at art museums, festivals, and alternative and public spaces; including, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Walker Art Center, Ars Electronica, Jacob’s Pillow, The Kitchen, Stedelijk Museum, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Rene Block Gallery and Frederieke Taylor Gallery. Phillips’s practice engages communities in workshops on Sound and Interactive Media. In 2017, Phillips taught in the Graduate Music Department at Wesleyan University, the Sound MFA Program at Columbia University as well as the Visual Arts Department, Purchase College, where she has offered classes since 1998. Phillips has collaborated with Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Simone Forti, Earl Howard, Robert Kovich, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik and Yoshimasa Wada. The Cleveland Orchestra, IBM Japan, and the World Financial Center presented her installations.
PAULA RABINOWITZ
(Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1986), Professor Emerita of English, University of Minnesota, serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. She is the author of four monographs, most recently, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street, (Princeton University Press, 2014), which won the 2015 DeLong Prize for Book History. Her earlier books include They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (Verso, 1994) and Black & White and Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (Columbia, 2002). She also has co-edited seven books, including the four-volume series, Habits of Being from University of Minnesota Press. She has been the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Rockefeller Residency at Bellagio, Italy, and two Distinguished Fulbright Professorships in Rome and Shanghai. During 2016, she was a research fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Both she and Phillips live in Queens, New York.
TEODORA STEPANČIČ
is a composer, performer and curator based in Brooklyn. As pianist Teodora specializes in contemporary music and premiering works of living and emerging composers. In recent years, she has been collecting and programming piano and chamber works that speak in the voice of the outsider, a hushed voice, that stresses generosity, attentiveness, intimacy and focus. In her compositions, Teodora explores different ways of incorporating theatrical and visual elements into music performance, cyclical and game-based musical forms, and developing works in close collaboration with individual performers. With composer Assaf Gidron, Teodora is part of a duo performing on casio organs, sine tones, piano and cello. Together they regularly organize concerts in USA, Serbia, Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, Argentina, Iceland and wherever they travel. Teodora is core member of Ensemble Modelo62 (the Netherlands). She studied piano and composition at the University of Arts in Belgrade and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
LUCIE VÍTKOVÁ
is a composer, improviser and performer (accordion, hichiriki, voice, synthesizer and tap dance) from the Czech Republic. During her studies of composition at Janacek Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno (CZ), she has been a visiting scholar at Royal Conservatory in The Hague (NL), California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (USA), Universität der Künste in Berlin (D) and lately at Columbia University in New York with Prof. George E. Lewis. In her recent work, she is interested in the musical legacy of Morse Code and the social-political aspects of music in relation to everyday life. She has been nominated on 2017 Herb Alpert Awards in Arts in category of Music and she has put together two ensembles – NYC Constellation Ensemble (focused on musical behavior) and OPERA ensemble (for singing instrumentalists). She admires music of Hanne Darboven.
SADIE YUDKIN
aka dj sad is a genderfuckd sound artist from Portland, Oregon. They are currently finishing their senior year at Barnard college in New York City, studying ethnomusicology. In ethnomusicology, they concentrate on qtpoc music history, which has been largely erased, disjointed, and appropriated by heterosexual white mainstream outlets. As a sound artist, dj and producer, Sad creates sonic space where identity is expanded and explored with the fluidity of sound and movement. Sad has goals of opening accessible art and social spaces for queer people and women, centering qtpoc and working toward the liberation of displaced locals globally. dj sad can be followed on instagram @dj_sad @stupitkidz and on SoundCloud at sadyud and stupit kidz